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Jun. 24th, 2002
I guess I wanna take a minute to explore the idea of honesty.
Honesty seems to mean alot of slightly different things to alot of people, but eventually what it comes down to is the idea that there is this thing called "Truth" (I won't discuss the ramification of whether this truth is universal or differs from person to person, though I believe that, for the most part, the truth DOES differ from person to person.) that we should tell.
There are all sorts of truths.
It is a truth that it is approximately 9:00 in the morning as I'm writing this.
It is truth that this mouse pad is blue and white and the computer is a sort of off-white creme.
These are not the truths we are usually interested in, though.
The truths we are interested in are more subjective things such as "Is XXX cheating on me?" or "Did YYY break this?"
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dustkitten feels that one should always and at all times tell the truth. I tend to agree, though the idea of "little white lies" is an issue I won't get into again (mostly I think it's a stupid thing to begin with anyways.)
But it's very difficult to be totally honest when one can not see the truth.
We all seem to have our own sets of filters that gives us an idea of what truths we can and can not see. One common filter is when a guy can't see the faults that a girl he is in love with has. Another common filter, and the one I want to talk about, is the all too common filter in which we can not see our own faults.
As I said earlier yesterday, we all have faults, some worse than others. We can be annoying, bitchy, whiny, unfair, prejudiced and more. I don't think it's necessarily that we want to be, more than we just are.
But many of us don't see that.
I've been accused on a couple of occasions of being unfairly prejudiced towards white males (in other words, somehow sexist and racist). If this is true, I've never seen it. Maybe it's that I don't want to see it. Maybe it's that other people want to.
The point is... you can't be honest... truly honest... without being honest about yourself. I'd argue that if you can't see yourself as you truly are, you can't see the world as it truly is.
Anyways, you SHOULD "Know Thyself" anyways. It's alot easier to accept your faults when you aren't arguing with yourself or others.
Truth is oddly subjective like that. It's all too easy to subject what you think of people onto people themselves. As the song goes, people are stranger when you're a stranger. When you believe that people suck, you tend to see the evil in people. If you believe, everyone is great, you tend to see only the best in them.
Hence, it's all too easy to end up with an untruth, about ourselves and others. So where does honesty come into it? How can we be fully honest when our truth is...wrong?
Is honesty equatable with knowledge of the truth?
I'm going to give the following example:
Let's say that, as an engineer, I create a model. What I'm modelling doesn't matter, really. What does matter is the following question: If I make a model based on a faulty premise, is that model correct?
Well, that seems a silly question. Of COURSE it isn't. If a premise is wrong, then the model can NOT be correct.
So only with a totally unbiased view of the world, can your truths be... true! But none of us is truly unbiased, so none of what we say can be said to be truly true. And our honesty has little to nothing to do with the truth, only the truth as YOU know it.
And... I'm not sure where I'm going with this anymore, so I'll end.
Honesty seems to mean alot of slightly different things to alot of people, but eventually what it comes down to is the idea that there is this thing called "Truth" (I won't discuss the ramification of whether this truth is universal or differs from person to person, though I believe that, for the most part, the truth DOES differ from person to person.) that we should tell.
There are all sorts of truths.
It is a truth that it is approximately 9:00 in the morning as I'm writing this.
It is truth that this mouse pad is blue and white and the computer is a sort of off-white creme.
These are not the truths we are usually interested in, though.
The truths we are interested in are more subjective things such as "Is XXX cheating on me?" or "Did YYY break this?"
dustkitten feels that one should always and at all times tell the truth. I tend to agree, though the idea of "little white lies" is an issue I won't get into again (mostly I think it's a stupid thing to begin with anyways.) But it's very difficult to be totally honest when one can not see the truth.
We all seem to have our own sets of filters that gives us an idea of what truths we can and can not see. One common filter is when a guy can't see the faults that a girl he is in love with has. Another common filter, and the one I want to talk about, is the all too common filter in which we can not see our own faults.
As I said earlier yesterday, we all have faults, some worse than others. We can be annoying, bitchy, whiny, unfair, prejudiced and more. I don't think it's necessarily that we want to be, more than we just are.
But many of us don't see that.
I've been accused on a couple of occasions of being unfairly prejudiced towards white males (in other words, somehow sexist and racist). If this is true, I've never seen it. Maybe it's that I don't want to see it. Maybe it's that other people want to.
The point is... you can't be honest... truly honest... without being honest about yourself. I'd argue that if you can't see yourself as you truly are, you can't see the world as it truly is.
Anyways, you SHOULD "Know Thyself" anyways. It's alot easier to accept your faults when you aren't arguing with yourself or others.
Truth is oddly subjective like that. It's all too easy to subject what you think of people onto people themselves. As the song goes, people are stranger when you're a stranger. When you believe that people suck, you tend to see the evil in people. If you believe, everyone is great, you tend to see only the best in them.
Hence, it's all too easy to end up with an untruth, about ourselves and others. So where does honesty come into it? How can we be fully honest when our truth is...wrong?
Is honesty equatable with knowledge of the truth?
I'm going to give the following example:
Let's say that, as an engineer, I create a model. What I'm modelling doesn't matter, really. What does matter is the following question: If I make a model based on a faulty premise, is that model correct?
Well, that seems a silly question. Of COURSE it isn't. If a premise is wrong, then the model can NOT be correct.
So only with a totally unbiased view of the world, can your truths be... true! But none of us is truly unbiased, so none of what we say can be said to be truly true. And our honesty has little to nothing to do with the truth, only the truth as YOU know it.
And... I'm not sure where I'm going with this anymore, so I'll end.
